many years of experience as a field biologist in Alaska, objected to using wilderness areas B 0 OK REVIEW s and their wildlife and small human popula- tions to test this "atomic plaything" (p. - . - -

I 216). Two Alaskan clergymen spoke against the project, and one aroused a small group of New Englanders whose opposition was fil-

Atomic Energy vs. Eskimos tered into influential segments of American societv. ,This activism broueht the Associa- -

tion of American In- dian Affairs to the aid

shipped to Japan three of the Inupiat, who The Firecracker BOYS. DAN O'NEIU. St. Mar- month, of the year; the then began to empha- tin's, New York, 1994. xii, 388 pp., illus., + harbor would be ice- size a legal point: the plates. $23.95. bound at other times. Bureau of Land Man-

The Alaskan newspa- agement had with- In 1959 when Edward Teller was in Alaska pers and chambers of drawn for the AEC to promote the nuclear excavation of a commerce enthusiastical- test acreage to which harbor in the Arctic, he quipped to re- ly endorsed the project, the Eskimos had a le- porters: "If your mountain is not in the but afew biologists at the gitimate claim. The right place, just drop us a card" (p. 92). For University of Alaska Department of the In- the opponents of Livennore Laboratory's studying the flora and terior under Stewart Project Chariot, "drop me a card" came to fauna and a geographer Udall agreed with the epitomize the untouchability and casual in- studying human resourc- Natives. In 1962 the difference to other people and the natural es at Point Hope near AEC canceled Project environment of certain physicists during Cape Thompson ex- Chariot after nuclear the early years of the Cold War. pressed serious doubts in testing was resumed in

Project Chariot came out of Livermore public about the safety of and the Atomic Energy Commission the project. More impor- In Alaskan history (AEC) formally in 1957 as part of Project tant for the future of "Biologist William Pruitt Packs&bou ant- the imbroglio politi- Plowshare devoted to peaceful uses of nu- Chariot, Livemwre ig- lers back to camp for -lysis as part Of the cized the Natives and clear energy. To test the feasibility of "geo- nored the Inupiat Eski- AEC-funded studies in the led eventually to the

Cape Thompson region. In 1961, Pruitt Alaska Native Claims graphical engineering" for construction of mos of Point Hope (of ,,, dismissed from the University of Alas- another Panama canal and also, not inci- whom Teller wanted to ka his reports noted relatively high lev- Settlement of 197 1. dentally, to continue bomb testing during a make coal miners if their els offallout in lichen, caribou, and Eskimos Nationally, the con- moratorium, several nuclear devices would hunting was affected ad- in the Arctic." [From The ~irmracker BOYS; troversy was a power- be detonated at Cape Thompson and a versely by the project). courtesy of LesVieieck] ful propellant in the harbor created. At first the harbor was pro- When the AEC finally emerging environ- moted as an economic boon to Alaska, a sent a team to explain mental movement; it place from which coal and oil (miles away Chariot to the village, the Natives were converted Commoner and put Alaska in and unconnected by road or rail) would be prepared with embarrassing questions and a the environmental spotlight where it re-

tape recorder to preserve for mains, and the biological study of Cape posterity the astonishingly Thompson was a pioneering environmental nalve and misleading state- impact report. The Eskimos seem to have ments of the scientists. invented what we all now call the NIMBY

The Eskimos reaffirmed ("not in my backyard") syndrome. More their strong opposition to the significant, the controversy is a frightening nuclear experiment. The illustration of the danger to democracy of new, minuscule Alaska Con- secret, unaccountable science, ~ t s practitio- servation Society publicized ners and institutions. the biologists' criticism of O'Neill's profluent narrative is what he what they considered AEC t e r n "historical investigative journalism" misrepresentation of their (p. 292). There is more than a touch of data. One of them alerted wild-western, white-hat-black-hat history Barry Commoner, who then here, and although the absence of shading (1960) was chair of an Amer- can be justified easily in the story of Project ican Association for the Ad- Chariot, the author creates some arguable vancement of Science com- impressions. Not all biologists are angelic mittee on science and human and not all nuclear physicists are demonic. welfare and founder of the Many of the latter did not agree with Tell-

"Lawrence Radiation Laboratory's Edward Teller (left) and Gerald Committee for Nuclear In- er's and Livermore's view of how the new

Johnson (lightsup) promote the ,,geographical formation. The Sierra Club power should be used. The decision to drop

to a receptive group of University of Alaska officials, including C. T. published the full report of the bomb on Hiroshima is treated too glibly Elvey (bow tie) and ~ o b m megman (right) in 1959. [From h e the Alaska Conservation SO- and the legislative history of the AEC is too Firecracker Boys; University Relations Negative Collection, Univer- ciety. Olaus Murie of the simplified, as are other aspects of the back- sity of Alaska, Fairbanks, Archwes] Wilderness Society, with ground history that might not tend to sus-

SCIENCE VOL. 266 28 OCTOBER 1994 663

Vignettes: Embarrassment

With embarrassment goes blushing. Why do we blush?. . . Darwin wanted to see how blushing was related to embarrassment in women,

who blush more than men. As he regarded it as a social signal, he was interested to discover whether the blushing occurs in places normally hidden by clothes. But being too embarrassed to try the experiment himself, he got his doctor friends "who necessarily had frequent opportunities for observation" to see how far the blush spread down below the neckline. It generally didn't. Whether this was because the visibility-limit was set thousands of years ago by the dress style of cave ladies, or whether it was set by individual experience to conform to their Victorian neckline, is an unanswered question. . . .

One can be embarrassed not only by oneself but by others, especially as a child by one's parents. My fatherwas an astronomer, Director of an observatory, nothing embarrassing in that. But he was decidedly eccentric. . . . At an international Astronomical Convention (note the word!) . . . my father took his clothes off and swam in the national shrine of Napoleon's Carp Pond at the Palace of Fontaine- bleau. He was surprised to be arrested. . . . There were small headlines comment- ing on foreign professors. . . .

There is no doubt we try to avoid embarrassments. . . . This extends to editing ourselves. If we are embarrassed by some kinds of ignorance, we edit the text of "what really matters." . . . Very common is the attitude to science that says it is no disgrace to be ignorant of how the universe ticks, and how technologies work. So most people are not embarrassed by scientific solecisms, even so extreme they pass over into being funny which, funnily enough, is just what happens with extreme embarrassment, no doubt as a divine protection.

The bottom line is that as embarrassment is multiplied by increases of social sophistication, which in this country is waning, it is now increased by the new expectations of literacy in languages and science. So-life will go on being blush- making.

-Richard L. Gregory, in Even Odder Perceptions (Routledge)

tain the moral ~o la r i tv of the narrative. In an early ~ a t i o k i l ~ c i k n c e Foundation an- nual report, O'Neill finds something sinis- ter in a flat, uninspired sentence about the need for a healthy partnership between sci- ence and government; he fails to mention that the sentence appears in an argument against political tests and loyalty investiga- tions of scientists doing unclassified basic research. And in a scattershot windup, he hints at a CIA conspiracy in the death of one of his protagonists following an auto- mobile accident.

In a book with so many literary pyro- technics, some duds should be expected. The Firecracker Boys remains an exciting, generally reliable account of a dismal but significant chapter in the recent history of science and society.

Morgan Sherwood Department of History,

University of California, Davis, C A 956 1 6 , U S A

Fractal Colonies

Fractal Modelling. Growth and Form in Biolo- gy. JAAP A. KAANDORP. Springer-Verlag, New York, 1994. xiv, 208 pp., illus. $39.95 or DM78.

The recent discovery of a geometry of struc- tures with non-integer dimension-frac- tals-has been a momentous event in one of the oldest fields of mathematics. This was not just the discovery of a new type of geometric object, but rather a realization that the field of geometry was immensely bigger than anyone had guessed. The inte- gers are but a small archipelago of infinites- imal islands in the sea of non-integers. Since almost all numbers are not integers, almost all geometric forms must be fractals.

The field took off in the 1960s, when Mandelbrot began showing that fractals both are easy to produce and can closely

resemble many real structures that could not be modeled well by Euclidean geometry. This latter possibility has been a mixed blessing. The ease with which "biological- look in^" structures can be created with - fractal-building algorithms has led some to uncritically "model" everything from mor- phology to phylogeny by constructing sim- ilar-looking fractals. Biologists seeing this could be forgiven for concluding that the entire subiect is an exercise in curve-fitting. -

Forgiven, but not allowed to continue with such a misconception. The language of fractals provides us with one of the best ways to discuss complex forms. In order to say something interesting, though, we must be able to relate the rules by which fractal structures are generated to the pro- cesses by which biological structures devel- op. A model of biological growth must do more than simply mimic the adult pheno- type, it must construct that form in a way that is related to the actual processes by which the organism develops. This is why most organic-looking fractals are not useful to biologists.

Most current work on fractals involves only a few ways to construct them. Many of these are based on iterative Drocesses in which discrete parts of structures are either added or re~laced. We might therefore look - for organisms whose growth involves the repeated addition of discrete units to a growing core. This is exactly what Jaap Kaandorp does in Fractal Modelling: Growth and Form in Biology.

Despite the title, which recalls d'Arcy Thompson's wide-ranging meditation on geometry in biology, Kaandorp focuses al- most exclusively on a single type of growth: growth of colonies by accretion at the tips of branches. Even then, he restricts his attention further to brandhing sponges and corals. There is good biological reason for this; most seemingly fractal-like organisms, such as vascular plants, display a number of developmental processes, such as apical dominance, that coordinate growth in dif- ferent areas, making models based on iter- ative addition unrealistic. By choosing to study those organisms whose growth really does look most like the iterative addition of basic elements. Kaandoro is able to draw conclusions from the behavior of his models that he can then test against growth exper- iments carried out on the actual organisms.

The book describes the actual algo- rithms in great detail, often inserting page- long segments of code into the text. Though this sometimes makes for awkward reading, it means that those interested in doing similar research can follow along closely, seeing where potential pitfalls arise.

Fractal geometry is clearly a much bigger subject than can be seen by means of the simple construction rules so far studied. Ad-

SCIENCE * VOL. 266 * 28 OCTOBER 1994